Shakespeare nailed it

[Pam Seeback]

Diebert: For example, one interesting subject might be a "dead drive", this will towards death and nothingness, as being paired up to its opposite: the will to forever, sustenance, reproduction and even "everything".

Diebert's words sum up nicely what makes man different from every other conscious being, that is, his consciousness of death and of life and of his drive toward both 'ends' of the spectrum of consciousness, absolute oblivion or absolute continuance. As Shakespeare's Hamlet succinctly put it "to be or not to be, that is the question..."

Who hasn't upon pondering the slings and arrows of life, thought of the blessings of unconsciousness? Or of the reverse, a conscious life that is free of their sting, either within this singular sentient existence or within an eternal spiritual existence? Is that why we come to forums such as these? To discuss our drive not to suffer our dual consciousness of life and death?

[Cahoot]

I come to find beauty in clarity of thought and voice, to hear and express.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

So you come to find "I & the Beholder". What clarifies our eyesight the most is to find the duality in all viewing: the will to last & the will to destruct. Keep an eye on both! That's why we got two eyes perhaps: one looking outside, one peering inside.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Is that why we come to forums such as these? To discuss our drive not to suffer our dual consciousness of life and death?

Visiting the forum might be, in most cases, and as well in my case, more of a longing to die, to sleep. And isn't it a dying, a falling, a descending into words, all falling apart because of contradictions? Or is it creating anything at the same time? It might be just another way to diminish our consciousness of life and our suffering.

• To be, or not to be, that is the question—
  Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
  The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
  Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
  And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep—

The violence of opposition: the death wish of human being. Escaping suffering of fate by violating the way: inserting the fundamental contradiction of existence which introduces death.

[Pam Seeback]

I come to find beauty in clarity of thought and voice, to hear and express.

Why?

[Cahoot]

To come to means to arrive at, as in, to come to a conclusion. You always come to where you’re at, which is always here, and here is only where beauty is.

To not be, requires inference.
To be (is), does not require inference.

"Why" is an inference.

[Pam Seeback]

Is that why we come to forums such as these? To discuss our drive not to suffer our dual consciousness of life and death?

Visiting the forum might be, in most cases, and as well in my case, more of a longing to die, to sleep. And isn't it a dying, a falling, a descending into words, all falling apart because of contradictions? Or is it creating anything at the same time? It might be just another way to diminish our consciousness of life and our suffering.

• To be, or not to be, that is the question—
  Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
  The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
  Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
  And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep—

The violence of opposition: the death wish of human being. Escaping suffering of fate by violating the way: inserting the fundamental contradiction of existence which introduces death.

I cannot see a scenario when opposition/death, therefore suffering, is absent from sentient consciousness. The basic eternal struggle to find something to eat or drink is born of the opposition to death. Who here hasn't caused some form of suffering in their quest for food and drink? And who here is able, even if they were willing, to live without the words that inevitably cause opposition in varying degrees when released into the world?

As I see it, for those who do, as do I, acknowledge that opposition (suffering) is the cost of sentient consciousness, be it non-conceptual or be it conceptual, the question is, can we oppose without bringing true Hamlet's prophecy of taking arms against a sea of troubles? I believe such a life is possible, a conscious life of suffering's acceptance in concert with a conscious life not to willfully cause suffering. This is why I come here, to find within myself and to express to others this middle or balanced way. In my offline life, humour, therefore laughter is my preferred suffering medicine.

[Pam Seeback]

To come to means to arrive at, as in, to come to a conclusion. You always come to where you’re at, which is always here, and here is only where beauty is.

When starvation is here or raping is here, is beauty here?

[Cahoot]

Such events only exist isolate in the twisted delusions of suffering, but in actuality, exist in the interconnected beauty of totality, which can only be here.

*

“A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!”

http://www.101zenstories.com/

[Diebert van Rhijn]

I cannot see a scenario when opposition/death, therefore suffering, is absent from sentient consciousness. The basic eternal struggle to find something to eat or drink is born of the opposition to death.

This impulse to keep eating and drinking is not exactly the result of any "sentient consciousness" contemplating the nature of a future death. One could just as well define eating as a drive to kill some other living thing or at least secure the fruit of someone else's labor (in other words: the drive to gain or grow). Of course most people go through all this quite mechanical, following some instinct and some culture, some randomness around it all.

As I see it, for those who do, as do I, acknowledge that opposition (suffering) is the cost of sentient consciousness, be it non-conceptual or be it conceptual, the question is, can we oppose without bringing true Hamlet's prophecy of taking arms against a sea of troubles? I believe such a life is possible, a conscious life of suffering's acceptance in concert with a conscious life not to willfully cause suffering. This is why I come here, to find within myself and to express to others this middle or balanced way. In my offline life, humour, therefore laughter is my preferred suffering medicine.

If suffering is seen as ignorance at heart, how would anyone cause it or stop causing it around himself? It flows only from him after having defined himself. His life being one big arc of suffering and contradiction. Of course this is a good source of laughter when bits and pieces are being understood. The irony can also hurt, like all sharper jokes I suppose.

[Pam Seeback]

Cahoot: Such events only exist isolate in the twisted delusions of suffering, but in actuality, exist in the interconnected beauty of totality, which can only be here.

The actual interconnectedness of the totality is not beautiful, nor is it ugly. Are the trees and the wind and the sky and the tiger and the mice and gravity and rain and your body, etc. which are all interconnected parts of the totality, conscious of the totality? Of course not. Which means they are not conscious of it being beautiful or not beautiful.

It is the conceptual Tao through you that attached the concept "beautiful" to its connectedness. Why can't the reverse also be true? That it is not beautiful?

*

“A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!”

http://www.101zenstories.com/

Stories about how one would think in times of impending physical death are just that, stories. Until it happens to you, you do not know.

[Pam Seeback]

movingalways wrote:
I cannot see a scenario when opposition/death, therefore suffering, is absent from sentient consciousness. The basic eternal struggle to find something to eat or drink is born of the opposition to death.

This impulse to keep eating and drinking is not exactly the result of any "sentient consciousness" contemplating the nature of a future death. One could just as well define eating as a drive to kill some other living thing or at least secure the fruit of someone else's labor (in other words: the drive to gain or grow). Of course most people go through all this quiet mechanical, following some instinct and some culture, some randomness around it all.

What do you mean by “not exactly?" The truth is that we don’t know how the wisdom that sustains sentient consciousness actually works.

If suffering is seen as ignorance at heart, how would anyone cause it or stop causing it around himself? It flows only from him after having defined himself. His life being one big arc of suffering and contradiction. Of course this is a good source of laughter when bits and pieces are being understood. The irony can also hurt, like all sharper jokes I suppose.

You used if, so lets reverse your line of thinking. If suffering is seen as wisdom at heart....?

Who knows what death is? Who knows what life is? No one. And yet, we think of life and death as if we do. The arc of suffering and contradiction, such is the game of the thinking sentient man. Thank God for those moments when suffering is given it momentary reprieve! For the moment logic saves us, imagination saves us, prayer saves us, beer saves us, coffee saves us, sex saves us, compassion saves us, laughter saves us. Perhaps this is why we choose to remain conscious and suffering, for these moments we are saved.

[RZoo]

The arc of suffering and contradiction, such is the game of the thinking sentient man. Thank God for those moments when suffering is given it momentary reprieve! For the moment logic saves us, imagination saves us, prayer saves us, beer saves us, coffee saves us, sex saves us, compassion saves us, laughter saves us. Perhaps this is why we choose to remain conscious and suffering, for these moments we are saved.

Suffering is the best thing that's happened to any of us. Without it, we would not be geniuses. We would not even be conscious if we didn't suffer. The sweet pleasures of life that we work so hard to obtain would be worthless and fall flat. Suffering is the cure for all stupidity, ignorance, boredom and meaninglessness. It is the source of all motivation and growth. We must respect our suffering if we respect ourselves, and we ought not deny the opportunity to others.

[Pam Seeback]

The arc of suffering and contradiction, such is the game of the thinking sentient man. Thank God for those moments when suffering is given it momentary reprieve! For the moment logic saves us, imagination saves us, prayer saves us, beer saves us, coffee saves us, sex saves us, compassion saves us, laughter saves us. Perhaps this is why we choose to remain conscious and suffering, for these moments we are saved.

Suffering is the best thing that's happened to any of us. Without it, we would not be geniuses. We would not even be conscious if we didn't suffer. The sweet pleasures of life that we work so hard to obtain would be worthless and fall flat. Suffering is the cure for all stupidity, ignorance, boredom and meaninglessness. It is the source of all motivation and growth. We must respect our suffering if we respect ourselves, and we ought not deny the opportunity to others.

Very wise words RZoo, I would go as far to say that it is when we totally accept that we cannot escape our suffering that it becomes our wise teacher. The irony is that we can't get to this place of total acceptance of suffering until we first suffer our attempt at total rejection of suffering. What a ironic joke we play on ourselves! Necessity is the mother of acceptance. What can we do about necessity? Nothing. That's it's wisdom.

[RZoo]

I would go beyond acceptance of the necessity and say that we can embrace our suffering as equally valuable - if not more so - as our joys, and secretly hope to preserve or strengthen it. Perhaps our greatest fear should be that we will not suffer enough, that we find comfort too soon and fail to reach our full potential.

Our suffering is not always within our control (asceticism may be the answer to that?). One thing that is definitely within our control is the suffering and challenges that we can bless and torment our chosen beneficiaries with.

"But wait, wait - reach what potential? You've got it all wrong; for the rest of us, the only thing that matters in life is happiness and that we don't suffer, at the expense of all else. What does intelligence, knowledge, consciousness, or anything else matter? If those require suffering then we will gladly give them up!"

A fine and fashionable counter-argument from the masses (who are stupid, inconsistent, and generally don't matter that much), but not from geniuses. Geniuses must reconcile their values of intelligence and consciousness with their conflicting hatred of suffering and value of bliss, joy or happiness.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

A fine and fashionable counter-argument from the masses (who are stupid, inconsistent, and generally don't matter that much), but not from geniuses.

There you have it, a primal suffering (inconsistence) defined as ignorance, as lack of understanding. But how much do you "suffer fools" or that the masses around you just don't "get it"?

[Diebert van Rhijn]

This impulse to keep eating and drinking is not exactly the result of any "sentient consciousness" contemplating the nature of a future death.

What do you mean by “not exactly?"

These impulses are not the result of any deliberation or contemplation on death, past or future. Your choice of restaurant might though. The body could easily eat itself to death or even starve itself out of protest because the mind does not share its primal immediate, pure impulse driven goals.

You used if, so lets reverse your line of thinking. If suffering is seen as wisdom at heart....?

The same life would remain one big arc of suffering and contradiction. Existence will never give up its prime ambiguity.

Who knows what death is? Who knows what life is?

The moment you know anything at all, you already defined them. The body does not "know" these things only our capacity to know creates them with every move. This can be understood!

[RZoo]

A fine and fashionable counter-argument from the masses (who are stupid, inconsistent, and generally don't matter that much), but not from geniuses.

There you have it, a primal suffering (inconsistence) defined as ignorance, as lack of understanding. But how much do you "suffer fools" or that the masses around you just don't "get it"?

You seem to be mistakenly thinking that I want the masses to agree with me or that I desire for them to agree with me. On the contrary, I have no ideas of equality or "universal" anything (the same for everyone). I was not being sarcastic when I said that it was "a fine counter-argument" for them or that they "generally don't matter that much" to me. It's my relative peers, the geniuses, that I am attacking here: "Geniuses must reconcile their values of intelligence and consciousness with their conflicting hatred of suffering and value of bliss, joy or happiness."

[Cahoot]

To be or not to be, that is the question.
To become or not to become, that is not the question.
Suffering that cannot be changed is being, not becoming, and in so being, is transcended by that which does not change, and that which does not change is being, not becoming.
Suffering that can be changed, which is subject to the becoming of striving or seeking or pursuit, is not the question.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

A fine and fashionable counter-argument from the masses (who are stupid, inconsistent, and generally don't matter that much), but not from geniuses.

There you have it, a primal suffering (inconsistence) defined as ignorance, as lack of understanding. But how much do you "suffer fools" or that the masses around you just don't "get it"?

You seem to be mistakenly thinking that I want the masses to agree with me or that I desire for them to agree with me. On the contrary, I have no ideas of equality or "universal" anything (the same for everyone).

The reason for that was your usage of the word "stupid" and the devaluation of the masses as "don't matter much". These display some strong values but perhaps I misunderstood. And so I was moving the definition of suffering from general unpleasantness to a question of values and a conflict of values. Perhaps Buddha's "life is suffering" meeting Heraclitus "all things come into being through strife necessarily"? Enlightenment then as a removing of suffering, ending ignorance and therefore necessarily things ceasing to come into existence all together. Of course things do not exist in the present moment as we need past, memory and complex perception to weave any existence out of our senses. Therefore enlightenment appears as a form of attention but also as disentanglement of our existence as creatures of the past ("historical consciousness"). Of course "no one" is left and certainly no joy or happiness. Not even tranquility. One way to describe this would be "one big illusion" as people can live happily without ever dealing with it and then enlightenment could as such always be discarded as non-consequential and non-existent.

[Cahoot]

Stories about how one would think in times of impending physical death are just that, stories. Until it happens to you, you do not know.

The thing is, outside the theories of speculation, when you write the way it will be, and then it comes to be, notions of linear time become less solid, along with the surety of what you think you know, and one becomes more familiar with thought transmuting into the corporeal. Everything you perceive that was made by man first existed as thought. Everything you perceive that was not made by man first existed as … ?

“I am is true, all else is inference.” All Else.
-Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

[Pam Seeback]

RZoo: I would go beyond acceptance of the necessity and say that we can embrace our suffering as equally valuable - if not more so - as our joys, and secretly hope to preserve or strengthen it. Perhaps our greatest fear should be that we will not suffer enough, that we find comfort too soon and fail to reach our full potential.

Acceptance of suffering includes our joys, for to be in joy is to suffer not being in joy. Every emotion a man or woman feels exists in suffering's acceptance.

Our suffering is not always within our control (asceticism may be the answer to that?). One thing that is definitely within our control is the suffering and challenges that we can bless and torment our chosen beneficiaries with.

Since the human mind by default is the distinction maker it has no control over its dual "sight". This is why consciousness suffers. Where control comes in is in having the wisdom of the mind's default dual view.

"But wait, wait - reach what potential? You've got it all wrong; for the rest of us, the only thing that matters in life is happiness and that we don't suffer, at the expense of all else. What does intelligence, knowledge, consciousness, or anything else matter? If those require suffering then we will gladly give them up!"

A fine and fashionable counter-argument from the masses (who are stupid, inconsistent, and generally don't matter that much), but not from geniuses. Geniuses must reconcile their values of intelligence and consciousness with their conflicting hatred of suffering and value of bliss, joy or happiness.

Your thoughts above are perfect examples of the mind's natural urge to divide and conquer taken to suffering's peak, that is, into the expression of hatred. Do you envision a consciousness beyond hatred that integrates its necessity to reject but no longer requires this necessity? And if so, do you accept or reject this vision?

[Pam Seeback]

Quote: movingalways:
You used if, so lets reverse your line of thinking. If suffering is seen as wisdom at heart....?

Diebert: The same life would remain one big arc of suffering and contradiction. Existence will never give up its prime ambiguity.

Existence cannot give up its prime ambiguity.

Quote:
Who knows what death is? Who knows what life is?

The moment you know anything at all, you already defined them. The body does not "know" these things only our capacity to know creates them with every move. This can be understood!

Whatever is understood is only for the moment. Is this what you mean by "our capacity to know creates them with every move?" Knowing that whatever is understood is only for the moment is an important truth, for it is only when we don't understand the impermanence of things do we cling to them as if they are permanent, i.e., the Christian view of an eternal heaven and hell. Clinging and suffering go hand-in-hand.

[RZoo]

Your thoughts above are perfect examples of the mind's natural urge to divide and conquer taken to suffering's peak, that is, into the expression of hatred. Do you envision a consciousness beyond hatred that integrates its necessity to reject but no longer requires this necessity? And if so, do you accept or reject this vision?

I can envision a very feeble and weak consciousness which neither hates nor loves, a consciousness that is beyond all judgement and valuation, even of life or death. Such a consciousness would have to be cared for by others, lacking the motivation or reason to lift its arm even to feed and sustain itself. Therefore, I envision this consciousness lying in a hospital bed with atrophied muscles, almost comatose. I judge this consciousness not as the pinnacle of humanity, but as a pinnacle of human sickness. While it may be true that this consciousness has less delusions than the rest of us and dwells in the "absolute truth", he is missing something key! He is missing the realization of his own sickness, the realization that his unwavering desire for "truth" is what makes and keeps him sick, the realization: "What is 'truth', but another metaphysical lie and falsehood that we humans have invented to torture each other? And now I am being tortured, to the point of death, by this cruel concept, this illusion?" If he can grasp this, the tremendous, useless burden of "the absolute" will be lifted and all he will be free to get up off the hospital bed and start living life.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Who knows what death is? Who knows what life is?

The moment you know anything at all, you already defined them.

Knowing that whatever is understood is only for the moment is an important truth

Yes, the moment you know anything at all, you're already establishing the truth of death or life's impermanency. And yet we don't expect this fundamental to change or reverse randomly.